프랑스혁명과 인권

“French Revolution and Human Rights: Reappraising The Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen in the Age of Globalization”

The paper intends to understand and re-evaluate the origins, transformations, and historical legacies of modem human rights by analysing and re-interpreting three different versions of The Declaration of Rights of Man and Citizen, which had been proclaimed in 1789, 1795, and 1799 respectively. Each Declarations of Rights reflected and represented how and to what extents revolutionary upheaval proceeded rapidly and radically from bourgeois to socialist-republic and then to reactionary stage. The delicate and significant differences of 1789/1793/1795 Declaration in their emphasis, rhetorics, and vocabularies illustrated what had been most urgent and controversial issues of the day, as revolutionary chariot galloped from the Constitutional Monarch to the Reign of Terror and stopped at the Directory Government. On the second half of the paper, the author critically examines how French Revolution’s solemn mottoes such as Freedom, Equality, and Fraternity partially failed to apply to French colony in the Caribbean. When revolutionary turmoils developed in Saint-Domingue in September 1789, French government, instead of eliminating the slavery system, exploited the conflicts among the White planters, the mulattoes, and the Black slaves for the purpose of keeping colonial mercantilism intact. Thus, National Convention’s abolition of slavery system in 1794 was not a result of pure humanitarianism but an inevitable by-product of French colonizers who desperately needed miliary support of the colonized to win its war against British-Spanish troops in the Caribbean. Ironically speaking, the success of Haiti Revolution in 1804 and the first establishment of the ‘black republic’ in the world demonstrated the very limit and fragility of The Declaration of Rights of Man and Citizen which felt short of bridging the gap between universalism and nationalism/imperial moralism/cultural relativism.